{"id":13746,"date":"2013-06-17T22:34:13","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T22:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leedpoints.com\/?guid=39f6897d1870481b2a36e9a0b27c29b5"},"modified":"2013-06-17T22:34:13","modified_gmt":"2013-06-17T22:34:13","slug":"who-says-there-aint-no-love-in-the-heart-of-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/who-says-there-aint-no-love-in-the-heart-of-the-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Who says there ain’t no love in the heart of the city?"},"content":{"rendered":null,"protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\n Shanghai, China by Lowcola<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Whereas upwardly mobile Americans have for decades fled inner cities for a suburban paradise replete with spacious homes, large vehicles and big-box consumer troughs, a post-recession urban revival is today making the suburbs the home of the down-and-out.<\/p>\n

So goes the storyline of an epic June 7 article<\/a> in the Financial Times <\/em>that tracks the slow re-emergence of downtown Detroit, civic enlightenment among the retiring U.S. “baby boom” generation, and the spectacle of street life only virbant cities can offer. <\/p>\n

“America’s growing love affair with a more European-style city is also boosted by the retirement of the US baby boom generation, many of whom are as bored of the suburbs as their children,” writes Edward Luce. “Like their offspring, many also wrestle with their inner Kurt Cobains. If you combine the steady rise in urbane ’empty nesters’ with the growing acceptance of gay culture and the mushrooming of independent charter schools that give families the option of staying on when their children reach school age, shifting US demography is a friend to the reviving downtown.”<\/p>\n

At the intersection of design, technology and engineering, a number of sustainability innovations are thriving solely in the urban context: climate resiliency<\/a>, urban agriculture, water efficiency, electric vehicles, “smart grid” technology, the Access Economy<\/a>, and unprecedented neighborhood-scale green building projects. The economic and environmental toll of the suburban lifestyle – where a resident must drive a few miles simply to procure a gallon of milk – appears to be losing its luster in leaner times, especially in neighborhoods where recessionary home foreclosures were most abundant. And in more rural settings, once-resilient economies centered around farming and natural resource extraction have given way to larger agribusiness consolidation and global imports. Left in its wake are rural U.S. communities with problems previously commonplace in inner-cities: a lack of economic opportunity, increased crime and illicit drug production (particularly methamphetamine<\/a>). <\/p>\n

And while in the United States this trend is propelled by recent economic and social shifts, the global phenomenon of urban migration is old hat in Europe and developing nations. In China, the government is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years. According to a June 15 article in the New York Times<\/a>, this massive social engineering project is “a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come.”<\/p>\n

The country’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, stated in his inaugural news conference in March that urbanization was one of his biggest priorities.<\/p>\n

[pagebreak]”This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability,” writes Ian Johnson. “Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers. …Across China, bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties. Towers now sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides. New urban schools and hospitals offer modern services, but often at the expense of the torn-down temples and open-air theaters of the countryside.”<\/p>\n

Although China is already booming with megacities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin are each among the 20 most-populated cities in the world – the number of of new Chinese city dwellers is expected to soon approach the total urban population of the United States. 
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Percentage of Urban Population: United States and China<\/strong>, SOURCE: New Geography<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

[pagebreak]At home and abroad, a handful of large technology, infrastructure, energy and engineering firms well versed on the urbanization trend – IBM, Schneider Electric, Siemens, CH2M Hill, Johnson Controls, for starters – are capitalizing with an increased focus on urban markets. Arguably one of the best events that brings these types of companies together to discuss the opportunity to apply sustainability to the global migration to cities, where greater density and access dramatically reduces an individual citizen’s carbon footprint, is Meeting of the Minds<\/a>, headed to Toronto this September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3294],"class_list":["post-13746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-green-building-posts","tag-sustainable-buildings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}